What is distributed tracing?

Modern applications and sites increasingly use many interconnected services. An application architecture that relies on many services or microservices is often referred to as a distributed system.

Distributed tracing is the process of tracking the activity resulting from a request to an application. With this feature, you can:

Trace the path of a request as it travels across a complex system

Discover the latency of the components along that path

Know which component in the path is creating a bottleneck

New Relic's distributed tracing

rpm.newrelic.com/apm > (select an application) > Distributed tracing: The Distributed tracing UI page shows a scatter plot diagram of traces, which lets you easily see outlier traces. You can use the filter to show certain types of traces, or group traces by different characteristics. To see the details for a trace, select one from the chart or table. For more screenshots of the UI, see the UI documentation.

Distributed tracing lets you see the path that a request takes as it travels through a distributed system. A distributed trace is composed of multiple spans, which represent time spent in services or resources of those services.

New Relic's distributed tracing features and benefits include:

A dedicated UI page with visual tools that help you analyze and troubleshoot traces.

Anomalous span detection: spans that are slow compared to their typical durations are marked as anomalous, with charts comparing timing with similar spans.

You can filter trace charts by different data points to see your trace data from different angles.